Amazon wants to sell you your next hyaluronic acid serum—with two-day Prime delivery, of course.
On Wednesday, the e-commerce giant launched its very first line of in-house skincare products, a brand it’s calling Belei, which comes from combining believe and beauty.
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The company decided to enter the market with a collection of affordable products to “help customers spend less time and money searching for the right skincare solutions,” Amazon’s head of beauty for private brands Kara Trousdale said in a statement. “We took a simple, no-nonsense approach when creating Belei, developing products with ingredients that are both proven to deliver results and also offer customers great value for the quality.”
Amazon has been slowly making its foray into the multi-billion dollar beauty industry for years, mainly by carrying coveted high-end brands, as Allure has noted. Now, the company wants to offer customers its own take on current skincare trends like micellar wipes and charcoal masks.
The Belei launch coincides with millennial beauty brand Glossier announcing a $100 million funding round, fueling existing IPO rumors. The announcement also comes at a time in which Amazon is catching flack for listing hundreds of items under its own Basics and Essentials lines, a move that’s been deemed an unfair advantage over other sellers on its own platform.
But other beauty brands currently listing their products on Amazon shouldn’t worry about losing customers to Belei just yet.
A report by Marketplace Pulse this month found that AmazonBasics products don’t necessarily benefit from being promoted by its parent company. Aside from listings like the best-selling AmazonBasics batteries, which are rated highly for being a cheaper alternative to name brand batteries like Energizer and Duracell, most in-house products don’t sell that well.
“Amazon has been successful selling basics under AmazonBasics and Amazon Essentials, but none of those products are obviously data-driven and instead appear to mimic the basics strategy other retailers use for their private label brands,” the report states. “The number of unsuccessful products and brands shows that the company doesn’t have it figured out.”
Another interesting finding in the report is that the company’s private labels without the “Amazon” name, like the little-known 28 Palms and Common District, aren’t doing as well as Basics or Essentials. This could bode well for household skincare brands when customers search and find them next to the generic sounding Belei.
